A man in /r/relationships tells a widow to "stop thinking [her issues] are more important than anyone else" and proceeds to tell her to stop "playing the victim". Posters react accordingly. (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
85 ups - 29 downs = 56 votes
90 comments submitted at 21:24:40 on Feb 22, 2014 by snallygaster
This is genuine question because I can't really tell: which is worse? I mean, someone you love leaving you means you lost a person (functionally) and the focus of your love, plus, it means the person is out there but doesn't want you, while with a death I'd say you lose less, in a way. I don't mean to sound insensitive here, I honestly can't seem to see why death is worse, even though I think it would be...
Edit: I would have thought SRD was more aware of what downvotes are for... Oh well.
[Here is your answer.] ( http://i.imgur.com/sXCfKO1.jpg)
All I can say is 'damn'
I see very little in that that wouldn't fit a bad breakup. Especially the "come back and tell me bye" thing, that's entirely possible with a breakup where one person just leaves one day, except there the tantalizing and cruel hope of relief dangles in front like a hamburger in front of a starving man.
The difference is that the other person can't answer.
The similarity is that in neither case will the other person answer. False hope is a bad thing, it prevents (or hinders) closure.
The other person can't answer.
Is that supposed to be worse than someone who can, but won't? I don't see that it is.
Because he might still want to.
And of course he might not, but he's still there. The tantalizing but permanently distant possibility makes it worse, not better. I've said this like 5 times now.
You've said "sure it's absolute that everyone is miserable in one situation and not the other, but getting dumped is still worse."
Yeah, this is a troll.
Death is worse. Always. If someone breaks up with you, you eventually realize it never would have worked out anyway, you weren't right for each other. And at least that way you can still hope they'll be happy with someone else and live a full life.
When that person dies, especially when you had a happy relationship... you'd always know that you were right for each other, and it was ripped away. I would much rather have my husband divorce me than to have him die. I don't think I could handle that.
>If someone breaks up with you, you eventually realize it never would have worked out anyway, you weren't right for each other.
I really don't think that level of rationalization ever made anyone feel any better. Instead, that realization comes only after the necessary time has passed and the grief has gone. Ditto for the next sentence, grief and lost love are inherently quite selfish emotions. Only once my pain has gone can I honestly say I hope good things for the person that, well, caused that pain to begin with. For that matter, depending on the nature of the breakup that may never come at all, instead hatred and disgust may take the place of grief.
> you'd always know that you were right for each other, and it was ripped away
I hadn't considered this aspect, I admit, but the converse, that "it wouldn't have worked anyway", seems like a very slim difference between the two, not enough to make me feel any worse or better. Maybe that's just me. But anyway, while this aspect does make the death seem worse, the "it wouldn't have worked anyway" angle doesn't even come up every time, because one might easily think it was fixable and it could have worked. In that case, the continued existence of the person who left is a tantalizing and tempting possibility dangled in the face of the person with love to give, something which isn't present with death. In other words, a breakup means that one person can forever think "what if?" questions and maintain hope that it could work again one day or that it could have been fixed, while death is final, a blessing, and a curse. The breakup could breed a lifetime of regret, like a death one has a hand in.
I still would prefer a breakup over a death, of course, but I can't quite put my finger on why just yet. Thanks for the reply in any case.
My SO died, and after some time I realized "it wouldn't have worked anyway" ... still, it was magnitudes worse than any breakup, of which I have had plenty.
No argument here, a death is likely to be worse than any breakup you actually experience, but only because breakups usually happen relatively gently, it's quite rare for a person to just, I dunno, not come home one day and move away, never to be seen or heard from by you again. But functionally, it's the same thing, with the exception that one can maintain a false and crushing sense of hope, not to mention the fact that the person left, as opposed to was taken, which of course can lead to self-doubt and what have you.
Man, whuuut? You can't seriously think that is someone dies gradually, like, they slowly die over the course of a year, that is going to make it easier! I wasn't trying to argue. I intended to provide anecdotal evidence that your feeling that whether "it wouldn't have worked anyway" was completely irrelevant. But maybe my reading comprehension skills were not adequate to parse your post.
To answer your original question, death is going to be worse than a breakup for the vast majority of people because death is one of the worst things that can happen to a person, and the vast majority of people are not soulless narcissistic psychopaths! <-- I'm not calling you names. It's understandable that you could be confused about it. It's not something you can truly understand without experiencing it.
>You can't seriously think that is someone dies gradually, like, they slowly die over the course of a year, that is going to make it easier!
I do, actually. You get to say your last goodbyes and such. A sudden death is far more tragic.
Look, all I'm saying is this: death is final, and leaves no hope in its wake, and no sense of abandonment either. Hope is bad, because it's almost always going to be false hope. A breakup is like having someone in a coma: they're there, you might even get to touch them, but they're little more than a physical embodiment of taunting hope that one day you might get them back, even though your probably won't.
I tried to explain it nicely to you.
Dude:
You.
Do.
Not.
Get.
It.
For your sake, hopefully you never will, because you will never experience the death of your SO. Then you can go on thinking that someone dying is comparable to someone deciding they don't want to hang out with you anymore. But you should probably keep that opinion to yourself when you go out into the real world ... just sayin'.
Aren't we a bit egoistocal here? Yeah it sure is sad that we lost our soulmate for good but shouldn't our main concern be that a person we cared for died? We should mourn them and not that we don't get to be with them anymore.
>If someone breaks up with you [...] at least that way you can still hope they'll be happy with someone else and live a full life.
That line should tell you that I'd be more concerned for their life rather than my own.
Oh yeah sorry my brain didn't compute that
How would you feel if you moved and had give your dog away to another family compared to your dog getting hit by a car?
I'm with the other commenter, a dog analogy simply doesn't work for me. To be honest, it's kind of insulting, but I'm not the sort of person to take offense.
For a start the very fact that you had to give your dog away is a bad comparison. A more apt one would be if your dog one day just up and left to live with another family, completely unprompted. That might make me wish it was dead instead, at least that spares me the betrayal and the subsequent tantalizing hope that he might come back one day (which might even end up, returning to human terms, with stalking and lack of closure). Love is selfish, one can't help but think "if I can't have him/her, no one should", at least at one point in the grieving process.
This is pretty much the exact response I was expecting from someone who lacks the empathy to understand why dying is worse than leaving.
Real love is not selfish.
And this is the exact response I expected from someone so blind to nuance they compared a breakup where one person just leaves to having to give your dog away.
I can't tell if these people are in way too deep with their pets or have an odd kind of superficial relationship with their significant others.
It's not like I'm taking a side on wanting my partner to die rather than leave me, I'm just saying "what the fuck, human and pet relationships have totally different qualities to them, why are you people trying to compare them like that?".
It's not a perfect analogy, it's a quick example for people who may not have experienced a death to understand the difference between someone being alive and not with you and someone being dead.
Apparently it went over your head.
But your dog isn't fucking some other person and falling out of love with you, and presumably you don't love your dog in the same way and haven't been set on sharing your entire future together.
Where the hell did you go to analogy school? Might as well have asked how they feel when they drop an ice cream cone vs giving it to a kid with cancer.
Many people consider their pets, particularly their dogs, a part of their family. By the way you responded, it seems highly likely you never bonded with one.
This is ridiculous. Since I don't feel the same way about my dog as I do my fiancée, I've never bonded with a dog? I don't even know how to respond to this. Do you feel jealous when your friend takes your dog for a walk? How about when it sniffs another dog's butt? Where is the dog infidelity line here, because if my fiancée sniffed someone else's butt, I'd be pretty upset.
Love does not require a sexual component, it is sad that you do not understand that.
Right, and we're specifically comparing non-sexual dog love to romantic love between two human beings here, the latter of which generally does involve monogamy and sex and all of those extra emotions. That's why it's different from the pet love, which is the entire point of this conversation.
>This is genuine question because I can't really tell: which is worse? I mean, someone you love leaving you means you lost a person (functionally) and the focus of your love, plus, it means the person is out there but doesn't want you, while with a death I'd say you lose less, in a way. I don't mean to sound insensitive here, I honestly can't seem to see why death is worse, even though I think it would be...
The original analogy was the difference between someone you love moving far away and someone you love dying through a dog comparison. Your appeal to the bad analogy was unfounded.
That's the crux of the matter, his analogy wasn't as bad as you made it out to be. That is my argument. Analogies by definition are different, so I don't understand why you are semantically dissecting them. I'd imagine a guy would say that he feels like a fish out of water, and then you would call that guy a dumbass for thinking he can't breathe air.
It's a thread about your significant other dying vs them leaving you (and everything that a romantic breakup entails that your dog moving to a new home most certainly doesn't entail). It's an obviously terrible comparison to any normal person. God damn. I'm gonna go eat some Cheerios, you have fun being obtuse.
And you have fun being a salty, anal jackoff. You missed the point entirely and ranted about a bunch of bullshit.
You're taking it to literally.
The point is that everyone would rather the dog be happy with another family rather than it die even though the result for you, no longer having the dog, is essentially the same.
Everyone, unless you're a sociopath, would rather their spouse be happy with another family rather than die even though the result for you, no longer being with him/her, is essentially the same.
Think I saw a study that said they were comparable in terms of grief/trauma/whatever. Whether that study was any good or not, I don't remember.